Death and the Devil

Jaspar was trying to open the trapdoor in the yard. “Well, if you insist, come out here.”

Jacob jumped up and went out into the dark yard. Jaspar had lit a candle and indicated he should go down first. Cautiously they negotiated the slippery steps. Jacob was plunged into the damp, musty smell once more and a strange feeling of timelessness came over him. The darkness in front echoed with the drip of water. Then candlelight filled the immediate surroundings. Jaspar was standing beside him.

“Could you imagine spending the rest of your life here?” he asked. “Not out of choice, but if you had to?”

“Not even by choice.”

Jaspar gave a dry laugh. “And yet this is paradise. What do we know about the Crusades anyway?” He went over to a barrel and drew off two or three pints. As he followed him, Jacob seemed to be floating. He wasn’t used to the stuff. He spun around, arms outstretched, and felt himself sink to the ground like a feather.

Jaspar gave him a searching look and placed the candle on the ground in front of him. Then he sat down opposite and filled the mugs. “This is a better place to talk about the Crusades,” he said, taking a draught.

Jacob followed suit. “Agreed.”

“No, you misunderstand. This cellar is a hole in the ground. It’s unhealthy and oppressive. It’s my penitential chamber.”

“Nice penance.” Jacob grinned.

“I could just as easily drink up there, in the warm. But that’s what I don’t do. To sit in a cozy, well-heated room talking about injustice and suffering seems to me tantamount to mocking those who really suffer. You want to know what Urban dreamed? He claimed the Lord appeared to him and commanded him to take up arms in the name of the Cross against the heathen and unbelievers. In November of the year of our Lord 1095 he preached the Crusade at the Council of Clermont, beseeching rich and poor to wipe out the Turks in a massive campaign, a holy, just war the like of which had never been seen. And everyone who was there—and there were lots, too many— burghers, merchants, clerics, and soldiers, tore their clothes into crosses, screaming Deus lo volt! Deus lo volt!

He was silent for a while. Jacob didn’t ask what the war-cry meant. He could guess.

“So off they went, kings and princes, knights and squires, thieves and beggars, priests and bishops, the riffraff from the streets, swindlers, murderers, anyone who could ride or walk. They set off rejoicing to fight for the Lord, bribed by the unparalleled remission of their sins, if only they would take up the sword and journey to the Holy Land. And they kept on crying Deus lo volt!, as if God could have wanted them to massacre the unbelievers in their own land, steeping their hands in the blood of the Jews of Mainz, Worms, Speyer, and other cities, to indulge in mindless, wholesale slaughter, beheading, burning, disemboweling innocent men, women, and children, laying waste to the countryside, plundering, the scourge of even the Christians they claimed to be going to liberate.”

Jaspar spat on the ground. “God willed that? The stories your Bram told about the Crusades were a load of crap. I heard them and nothing could be further from the truth, even if he did put it over well. Bram was no crusader. He’d got to know a few of those who came back with no arms, no legs, or no wits left. Hungary and Byzantium, Istria and Constantinople, everything was razed to the ground. I read what a chronicler from Mainz wrote, before they butchered him, too: Why did the sky not go black? Why did the stars not extinguish their light? And the sun and the moon, why did they not go dark in the vault of heaven when, on one day, eleven hundred holy people were murdered and slaughtered, so many infants and children who had not yet sinned, so many poor, innocent souls? They beseeched the Almighty to help them, but the Almighty happened to be somewhere else, or perhaps He thought they deserved it. And all that happened while they were still here, in our towns and cities.”

He shook his head. “Then they went off to the Holy Land, in the name of the Lord. The scum, the foot soldiers, the bands of marauders, never arrived. They either died of starvation, were killed, or simply dropped dead on the way. But the great armies of knights did get there. They besieged Jerusalem. For five weeks! They sweated themselves silly in their armor, they must have stunk like pigs, they were foul and festering, but they held on. Then they entered the city. It is said that on that day our men waded up to their horses’ fetlocks, to their knees in Saracen blood. What was their new Christian kingdom founded on? On murder! On torture and mutilation! On rape and pillage! Those are your Christians, my son. That is the Christianity we’re so proud of. Brotherly love!” He spat contemptuously. “And what is it Paul says to the Hebrews? A few boring injunctions: Let brotherly love continue. Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body.”

Jacob waved his mug as he tried not to lose his balance. “But that was all a long time ago,” he said, the sounds merging into one long word.

“No!” Jaspar shook his head violently. “No, the Saracens reconquered Jerusalem. There was one Crusade after another, especially after even a saint like Bernard of Clairvaux placed himself at the service of the butchers. You know Bernard?”

“Not as such—”

“Of course not. Again there were letters of indulgence, sold like quack remedies, papal bulls sanctioned murder and more murder. And the knights! Life in a castle can get pretty boring when there’s no call for your skills, so they put their armor on and went out crying Deus lo volt! again. But it was no use. They couldn’t repeat the pathetic success of the first Crusade. Lured by the promise of fabulous treasure, they went to the Holy Land to be defeated and die, fighting for power among themselves, with the Church trying to consolidate its leading role. Honorable reasons, as you can see. And then the Crusade came to Cologne. Or rather, its vile breath blew through the streets and touched a boy named Nicholas and one or two other ten-year-olds. This Nicholas stood up in the streets and called on all the children to follow him to Jerusalem and defeat the Saracens by the power of faith alone. They intended to part the Mediterranean as Moses had parted the Red Sea, this infantile horde, and even priests and pilgrims didn’t think it beneath them to join it, not to mention maids and servants. God knows how they managed to cross the Alps, the youngest not even six years old, but by the time they reached Genoa most were dead and they were reduced to a pitiful handful. And what happened? What happened, eh?”

Jaspar’s fist hammered on the stone floor. “Nothing! Nothing at all! The sea didn’t give a shit for them. Part? What, me? I need a prophet for that, or at least a Bernard of Clairvaux. There they stood, the lost children, exhausted, robbed of everything they had, weeping and wailing. In St. Denis there was another such lost child, Stephen. He’d not yet grown a beard, but they still followed him by the thousand and they marched to Marseilles. Suffer the little children to come unto me, said the Lord, but in Marseilles it was two merchants who said that. They packed the children on ships and sold them as slaves to the very men they had set out to conquer, Egyptians and Algerians. Now do you wonder why the people of Cologne of all places have good reason to be suspicious of Crusades?”

Jaspar’s voice had started to go around and around Jacob, like a dog yapping at his heels. He put his mug down. It fell over. “They should have just boxed the children around the ears,” he babbled.

“They should have. But they didn’t. Do you know what the pope said? These children shame us. For while they hasten to win back the Holy Land, we lie asleep. That is what he said. But one year later, when the disaster was there for all to see, they hanged Nicholas’s father in Cologne. Suddenly it was all his fault; he had sent his son off out of a desire for glory. Suddenly everyone thought it had been madness. Funny, isn’t it? And now? Conrad von Hochstaden has announced a sermon against the unbelievers for the day after tomorrow. He’s going to deliver it in one of the chapels of his new cathedral. In Rome recently a new Crusade was proclaimed against the Tartars. Does anything strike you?”

Jacob was finding thinking difficult. Did anything strike him? “No,” he decided.

Jaspar reached over and grabbed him by the jerkin. “Yes! It’s starting again. I talk of brotherly love and the Christian life, and they talk of Crusades. God knows, I’m not overendowed with morality, I drink, I swear, and, yes, as Goddert quite rightly pointed out, I fornicate, and I think the Waldenses should be punished, and a few other heretical curs along with them—but a Crusade can’t be God’s will. It’s too cruel. It makes a mockery of the cross on which Christ died. He damn well didn’t die so we could start a bloodbath in Jerusalem, or anywhere else in the world for that matter.”

Jacob stared at him. Jaspar’s chin was slowly merging with his forehead, while a second nose had appeared. He burped.

Then Jaspar’s face dropped from view to be gradually replaced by the patterns of shadow on the cellar